Growing at the Speed of Life - A Year in the Life of My First Kitchen Garden

this personally, even though I was far from the

only one urging folks to consume more.

Why was this happening? And what more
could be done to achieve the needed 300 per­

cent increase to between 9 and 11 servings a day that

most experts (according to the OmniHeart Study)

believe to be the amount needed to truly make a

difference in diabetes, heart disease, and of course

obesity?
I decided to go back to the starting line and begin

to run the whole race by doing something entirely new. During my earlier TV

career as the Galloping Gourmet, I was awarded the Broken Wooden Spoon by

Weight Watchers International. The company described me as public enemy

number one to all those making healthy choices.

Clearly, in the 1,000 new TV programs we’ve made since 1987, we have
changed—and Weight Watchers did eventually send me an unbroken spoon!

However, even those changes had not made the adjustments that our modern

world now needs.

I wondered if I could help others to reach these goals with a little sweat eq­

uity in my own backyard and enthusiastically pass my experiences on.

The home that my wife, Treena, and I built and moved into in April 2001 is

situated with views facing to the west and south over the fab­

ulous Skagit Valley, one of the most productive agricultural

delta valleys in the world, just halfway between Seattle, Wash­

ington, and Vancouver, British Columbia. The design of the

house was inspired by our love of boats—it’s a mere 1,400-

square-foot “cabin” that uses its limited space in much the same

way as a maritime architect might have designed it. Called Non­

such Cottage, after a small sailboat we once owned (and, purely

coin cidentally, after the infamously overembellished castle

built by King Henry VIII in the south of England), our cottage

WHY I DECIDED TO GROW A GARDEN • 3